The invention relates to a method of fractal image coding of single images or image sequences. The invention also relates to an arrangement for performing the method.
In known arrangements or methods for fractal image coding, the image is divided into range blocks. These blocks have mutually equal sizes, do not overlap and cover the complete image contents. Moreover, domain blocks are generated which comprise image data about a given image area. Since the domain blocks may overlap, the number of domain blocks is a multiple of the number of range blocks. Such a method is known from, for example the article "Fractal Image Coding and Magnification using Invariant Moments", by D. Gotting, A. Ibenthal and R.-R. Grigat, in Nato Advance Study Institute on Fractal Image Encoding and Analysis, Trondheim, Norway, 1995.
A domain block is searched for each range block, which domain block can be imaged on the range block with a minimal deviation by means of an (affine) transformation.
The problem with coding is that, due to the number of large domain blocks, the search for the most favorable domain block for each range block requires a considerably elaborate computation. Moreover, due to the fixed division of the image, this known method is inflexible, particularly in the domain blocks.